


If I Could Grant You Peace of Mind

by ReaperWriter



Series: Mansion House Nocturnes [6]
Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death- Tom Fairfax, Civil War, Emmry, F/M, I really dislike Frank, Mansion House, Opposing Parties to Friends, Slow Burn, not sorry, sorry - Freeform, to something more
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-30
Updated: 2016-03-30
Packaged: 2018-05-30 01:22:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6402736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ReaperWriter/pseuds/ReaperWriter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Emma Green had always been a girl who knew her place in the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If I Could Grant You Peace of Mind

**Author's Note:**

> Right, so a few quick notes. I adore Phoster, but I also love Emmry. Like, stupid big bunches. And yes, historical Emma ends up marrying Frank (who becomes a minister...wha???), but, well, historical Mary is like 50 years old in 1862 and historical Alice is dead, so. 
> 
> Also, I adore this fandom. Seriously, no one gushes over my fic in other places the way you guys do. Its a small group, but the quality is soooo good, I love it. It definitely keeps the muse inspired. 
> 
> That said, this one is for montanabohemian over on Tumblr, who is the first person ever to post a reaction gif on my fic. I teared up. Not even lying. Thank you!

If I Could Grant You Peace of Mind

Emma Green had always been a girl who knew her place in the world.  Cossetted daughter of James and Jane Green.  Younger sister.  Elder sister. La jolie fille of Alexandrian society.  Destined to marry a fine, upstanding southern gentleman like Frank Stringfellow, to run his household, to bear his children.  She was destined for balls and social calls, tea and picnics.  A thing of beauty to be admired, with just enough spirit to keep her interesting to her husband and to hold her place in society.

And then the war had come.  And suddenly, the balls stopped happening.  The picnics ceased.  In their place, there were fair the well fetes and fundraisers.  Ladies gathered to roll bandages and knit socks instead of having tea.  Courting hours were replaced with letters from training camps and field bivouacs.  But still, Emma had clung to the familiar.  Her family’s position as leaders of their circle.  Frank’s love, expressed in the letters she hid from her mother.  Daydreaming with Alice about how handsome their beaus would look when this silly, short war ended and they came home to dance again.

Then Alexandria fell.  And the Yankees came.  And oh, she wished to hate the Yankees.  She did hate the Yankees for commandeering not only their home, but Mansion House.  For taking what was not theirs to take, and destroying it.  She had listened at the door of her father’s study as her mother bemoaned that the blood –blood!- would never again come out of the floors of the hotel, nor off the fine imported French wallpaper.  How they’d just as well to burn it all down when the blue devils fled back north and start over. 

And she couldn’t understand why her father didn’t resist as their neighbors did.  For all his talk of not risking their property, surely their honor required- neigh, demanded!- that they put up more than the token resistance of refusing to sign their damned loyalty oath.  Emma seethed with it, and more, ached with the deeper cost, to her, of Yankee occupation.  Letters from the front, from their local boys, from dear Frank, had ceased to pass through enemy lines.  She had no idea of his safety or well-being.

Thus her act of defiance that fine morning of dressing and taking a care basket and marching in to Mansion House.  Into the belly of the Yankee beast, as it were.  And Lord, she had not been prepared.  Not for the smell, an awful mix of iron tanged blood and urine, of human feces and the reek of gangrene rotting men apart around their wounds.

She had not been prepared for the sounds.  For the quiet moans of pain, for the whimpers like a wounded animal.  For the lamented, gasping prayers of the dying, for the gurgling of men drowning in the blood backed up in their lungs.  For the weeping of a wife arrived too late to say good bye to her beloved husband, or the mother to her son.  Nor for the bark of orderlies and nurses and doctors, calling out orders, making demands.

And she was certainly not prepared for Tom Fairfax.  For him to look both mostly in talk, and yet damnably broken all at the same time.  She was not prepared for the sea change in the man, who had been bright and laughing and fun as he spun Alice around the ballroom of their home; as he told jokes at the church social; as he did tricks riding on that old red roan horse of his.  Emma had read of war in classical literature- in Homer, in the medieval epics, in novels with desperate heroines and brave knights.  But this was not that glory.  This was a horror, eating away at her friend.  And still, there was no word of Frank.

She wondered, later, where that steel spine had come from that made her demand a place there, accommodations and treatment for her boys.  That let her stand up to not only their Yankee oppressors, but her own parents.  One honored thy mother and father, one did not rise up against them.  But for the first time in her life, Emma felt something more than pretty, or charming, or accomplished.  She felt needed, and it was, in itself heady.

She found herself surprised by the companionship she found in that Yankee chaplain.  Reverend Hopkins was an altogether different man than she was used to.  He was stiffer, perhaps, more formal than the kindly preachers she was used to.  He was quieter, less showy then the boys she had known.  But he was kind to her, and more than that, to her patients.  He ministered to them in his odd Yankee Lutheran way whether they wore the blue of the north or the grey of the confederacy.  And he was kind to Tom.  If nothing else endeared him to her, it was that he was so kind, and tried so hard for Tom.

She still kept him distant though, because suddenly Frank was there again, warm eyes and warm hands and soft lips.  She let him have liberties she might not otherwise have done, in her relief.  And he seemed so brave to take on such a dangerous mission in town.  To risk all if he was captured.  They imprisoned enemy soldiers, but everyone knew the hanged spies.  And it made her feel brave to do her part and help him get Tom out.

Perhaps that is why it hurt her so very badly when it all went to hell.  When the Yankees had dragged back poor, poor Tom’s corpse.  It wasn’t Frank there to intervene with her in the street, it was Reverend Hopkins…Henry.  He was the one who stepped in.  Who carried the sad remains inside as she had cried in Nurse Mary’s arms.  It was Henry who had looked nearly as wrecked by it as she felt. And it was Frank who lied to her, who told her how Tom had died a hero to the cause, saving him.  Who had not trusted her to be strong enough to handle the truth, when it had been she who had been at Tom’s side all these weeks in the hospital, who had seen how damaged he was.

And she had been so angry at Henry, because he was other, a Yankee, and she wanted to hurt the Yankees.  Perhaps that was why she had gone to his makeshift chapel in what used to be the back parlor of the hotel.  Perhaps that was why she lashed out at him, burdening him with the sins of his entire army.  And perhaps that was why she was so mortified when he called her own sins out in return.  When he trusted that she was strong enough to handle the truth, to know of her own culpability in Tom’s death.  To let her see how broken it had made him too.

The moment, in that place she had played as a child, brought home just how much had changed.  This wasn’t her childhood anymore.  She wasn’t that girl.  Frank wasn’t the man she had long believed him to be.  Or perhaps he was, but what she believed had changed, was changing.  She knew she’d never again be free of the guilt of a death, never again be able to sit and sip lemonade and act like none of this had happened.  That she was other now too, changed by this place and this war.  She didn’t know what that meant for her future.  Maybe she could come to love this new Frank, and he this new her.  Or perhaps not.  Maybe she would find salvation somewhere else in the end. 

But in that one moment, she needed nothing so much as absolution, given and received.  “Chaplain Hopkins, I am sorry.  I…I am sorry.”

“And I, Miss Green.  Truly.” She could see the truth of that in his eyes.  “For your loss, and for Tom.  I had hoped…”

They fell silent then, in the quiet of that one room.  Then she offered an olive branch, what felt like the first of many to come.  “Would you come with me? To the burial?  I feel as though Tom would want you there.”  She could not say too, I want you there.

But something small and warm flickered in her at the ghost of a smile he gave her.  “It would be my honor, Miss Green.”

Yes, Emma knew she wouldn’t ever be the same after the war.  Never that pretty glass doll she had once been.  But perhaps, just perhaps, that would be all right in the end.


End file.
